Tending to Our Patch of the Sky

Tending to Our Patch of the Sky

Here we are again at the start of the Gregorian calendar! 2024 was one wild ride of a year, as most years have been lately. I don’t know if the world is actually getting more complicated and daunting, or if this is just what happens as you start getting older and paying closer attention to everything around you…or both. But in any case, what a year!

2024 was many things for me, but above all else, it has been a profound time of trying (key word!) to hold contradictions without moving to hide it or fix it.

An Invitation to Hold Complexity Together

An Invitation to Hold Complexity Together

If you are feeling despair and helplessness, know that you are not alone. I’ve been going to some dark places in my mind these last few weeks and have been prone to random outbursts of inconsolable sobbing. I can’t help but feel the unbearable heaviness of this grief.

I know though that when we are operating from a place of trauma and pain and fear, we reach for the binary, for extremes and absolutes. We want simple and easy. How could we not?

But that, my dear friends, is the way of the oppressor. And we must refuse to succumb to such narrow thinking. After all, that’s what got us here in the first place.

What we need in this moment is to practice holding complexity, to practice holding multiple truths at once, and to practice sitting in the discomfort of such uncertainty.

Living Out the Visions of the World We Want

Living Out the Visions of the World We Want

As many of you know, I have spent the last year actively organizing for the end to Israel’s genocidal violence against the Palestinian people, and advocating for a free and liberated Palestine. It has been twelve long months (and far too many decades for many Palestinians) of protesting, marching, calling, emailing, and even visiting elected officials week after week after week. It has been twelve long months (and far too many decades for many Palestinians) of organizing actions aimed at pressuring these elected officials to end our country’s complicity in this genocide and enact a two-way arms embargo immediately.

It has been all too easy to fall into despair watching the horrors of genocide live-streamed on our social media feeds while world “leaders” gaslight us into thinking that this is what justice is supposed to look like.

But the truth is that while, of course, my blood pulses with rage watching our world “leaders” cowardly sit back and operate business as usual in the face of genocide, despair has not been my go-to place. Quite the contrary. If anything, this past year has been the most hopeful I’ve felt in a very long time. This past year has solidified my belief that a new world is on the horizon. This past year has been deeply transformative as I have witnessed and experienced the miraculously connected and caring ways we can choose to live with each other.

The Distances Within & Between Us

The Distances Within & Between Us

As you know, my work is largely centered around practicing anti-racism, anti-oppression, and equity. Over the last few years, I’ve worked with school boards, government agencies, businesses, non-profits, and other cultural organizations to educate staff and students alike about racial justice issues and how we can all act in solidarity across socially constructed lines.

Throughout the last few years of doing this work, I’ve noticed that much of the conversation is still centered around whiteness. When mainstream conversations address racism, the discussion is often – as most things always are – centered around white people. So much of our discourse today is still very much trapped in binary thinking – white people against all non-white people.

If I’m being perfectly honest and candid here, I’m tired of educating white people about their privilege and how they – knowingly or unknowingly – oppress, discriminate, and harm racialized people. This educating? This labour to show how they perpetuate the systems their ancestors created? It’s exhausting.

Fireflies & The Fuckery

Fireflies & The Fuckery

Found images, broken glass, fake leaves, and LED fairy lights on a rattan woven tray. 

“The Fuckery is all of the persistent, systemic, intersecting, and evolving ways that status and superiority play out: race, gender, ways of thinking and moving, ableism, fatphobia, class, religion, and sexual identity. It disconnects us from ourselves and each other and lies to us about what the future can be…It is awful, hypocritical, insipid, frustrating, traumatic, maddening – it is The Fuckery of it all. It is “fragile” in the way that the sharpest edge of a broken fragment of glass is fragile. It has left us with a shattered image of our collective humanity.” – Bina M. Patel, Say The Quiet Part Out Loud 

Fireflies & The Fuckery is a response to this passage from Bina M. Patel’s Say The Quiet Part Out Loud. It is a physical representation of the sharp yet fragile broken glass that makes up our world: The Fuckery – that is, our inheritance of colonial, patriarchal, ableist, capitalist, and white supremacist systems of oppression. 

All over the broken glass, we see people trying to lift themselves up, climbing over the sharp shards on their own or with the help of another. It is a painful, perilous, and ultimately futile climb that hurts and wounds all of us. Even when we make it up the top of a shard – it is still just that: a shard, a piece, a fragment of a whole that cannot find its way back to the others. 

Honouring Asian Heritage Month by advocating for a Free Palestine

Honouring Asian Heritage Month by advocating for a Free Palestine

First and foremost, let me begin by saying that cultural or heritage or other commemorative months for different oppressed peoples have never sat well with me. Those of you who have been following my work for a while now should know this about me already. But for those who don’t, a quick explainer on my stance (or you can read the long version here)…

While the creation of these holidays may have been well-intentioned and a symbol for progress at the time, the reality is that it can largely be performative and more often than not, limits us to the bare minimum.

It encourages all of us to learn of these histories, heritages, cultures, and communities only during these specific times of the year instead of all year round as an integrated part of our educational curriculum and our collective consciousness. It’s lazy at best, and deeply harmful at worst.

It’s harmful because these cultural heritage months subtly reinforce the mentality of scarcity that plagues so many of us who are part of these marginalized communities.

Wearing My Keffiyeh: An Act of Resistance & Solidarity

Wearing My Keffiyeh: An Act of Resistance & Solidarity

Over the last few months, I’ve added a new garment to my wardrobe that I wear proudly on a near daily basis. It’s the keffiyeh.

For those unfamiliar, the keffiyeh is a traditional headscarf worn in the Middle East. It was originally (and still is) used as a practical and protective covering against sunburn, dust, and sand in the extreme and arid desert climate of the region. It was historically worn by the peasantry, while the fez or tarboush, a red felt hat, was worn by urban, middle- and upper-class Palestinians. But this distinction fell apart in the 1930s when Palestinians unified against British colonial rule and all classes began to wear the keffiyeh, becoming a symbol of political resistance and Palestinian nationalism.

This symbolism deepened throughout the decades with the growing Palestinian resistance movement and was popularized by Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, who wore it always and everywhere. The keffiyeh was also worn by revolutionary figures like Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro – who were opposed to Israel’s apartheid against the Palestinian people – further entrenching its significance. This black and white scarf has a long and complicated history that I highly recommend you read more about here.

Today, the keffiyeh is worn internationally by Palestinians and supporters of their cause for liberation and sovereignty. Over the last few months, I’ve seen tens of thousands of people marching the streets of Toronto and all around the globe while wearing this beautiful symbol of resistance in solidarity.

Suffering is not a competition. Compassion is not a zero-sum game.

Suffering is not a competition. Compassion is not a zero-sum game.

Let me begin by naming two irrefutable facts – neither of which takes precedence over the other, but rather sit together side by side.

I stand, in no uncertain terms, in support of a free and liberated Palestine.

I stand, unequivocally, against antisemitism and Islamophobia.

Contrary to the terribly biased reporting that has been coming out of mainstream media these days, these two facts are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I believe that we cannot have one without the other.

But alas, many of my words have been warped and twisted in ways that do not reflect my values, my work, and my commitment to equity, justice, and liberation.

We are each other's harvest.

We are each other's harvest.

"that we are each other's 

harvest:

we are each other's

business: 

we are each other's 

magnitude and bond."

– Gwendolyn Brooks

I am bringing this spirit of collective care into all that I do and all that I create in 2024.

At a time when our world has been watching the climate crisis in full and terrifying view and when people continue to be violently and horribly displaced from their homes, I find myself more than ever resisting despair and growing even more firm in my convictions in the 3DR approach: to decolonize, disrupt, dismantle, and rebuild. And above all, I am even more committed to doing all of this in deep community and collaboration with each of you.

The last few months of 2023 were deeply transformative for me and I am still finding the words to capture the reverberations of such a major tilt of an axis. But here’s an attempt…

Home Ownership in this Economy? Grappling with Class Privilege

Home Ownership in this Economy? Grappling with Class Privilege

If you follow me on social, you’ll know that it’s been a busy few months on my end as my partner and I have recently bought and moved into a new home. We’ve been joking about taking a “death pledge” together because we learned that the root words of mortgage come from the French word mort, which means “dead”, and gage from Old English, which means “pledge”. Incredibly fitting, isn’t it?

It’s been an exciting time as we take our relationship into a new chapter and move into a bigger home in the heart of the city that we both love so much.

Throughout this experience, I’ve been having a lot of feelings about the privilege of having a home to call my own in the midst of a housing crisis in this city (and beyond). I often feel uncomfortable and straight-up ashamed to say I bought a place. It feels arrogant and audacious at a time when so many can’t afford what is, but should not be, this luxury of a home.

Taking Pride in Being the Only Person of Colour in the Room

Taking Pride in Being the Only Person of Colour in the Room

My migration story begins at the young age of four. Like many new immigrants to Canada, my family and I moved to an apartment in Scarborough when we first arrived from the Philippines. As of the latest census, more than half of Scarborough’s residents were born outside of the country with visible minorities making up 76.6% of the population.

After a few years, we moved to a bigger home in Markham, a suburb outside of Toronto that is often hailed as Canada’s most diverse community with visible minorities representing 77.9% of the population. I grew up in this city and spent the majority of my life there. 

I’ve always felt immensely fortunate to have grown up in such culturally rich communities with friends who were born elsewhere or whose parents’ or grandparents’ were born elsewhere. After-school hangouts at their homes always made for a delicious time with diverse dinners and exposed me to a beautiful medley of accents from around the globe. I credit my early upbringing with much of the work that I do now with Living Hyphen.

But somewhere along the way, I got lost in a sea of whiteness.

Another World Is Possible. It's Ours To Create.

This post is part of my 3DR newsletter where I share what I’m (un)learning to build just futures. It centres around my 3DR approach to equity: Decolonize. Disrupt. Dismantle. Rebuild. If you approach the world with curiosity and you’re looking for courageous and compassionate conversations around social justice and collective liberation, subscribe to my newsletter.

This year, one of my intentions is to get involved locally to see the change that I want to see in my world.

A lot of my writing and work is often focused on the 3Ds of my approach to equity – decolonizing, disrupting, and dismantling systems of oppression – which is necessary and important work, of course. But I want to focus more too on the “R” – the rebuilding. I want to focus more this year (and for the years to come) on creating the world that I want for myself and for future generations.

As Kwame Ture writes, “When you see people call themselves revolutionary always talking about destroying, destroying, destroying but never talking about building or creating, they’re not revolutionary. They do not understand the first thing about revolution. It’s creating.”

This year, I’m focusing on the generative work of paving better pathways and creating more equitable possibilities for our future. I’m focusing on expanding my imagination and exercising the creativity it takes to actually build caring communities. I’m focusing on transforming our world from the ground up, from the local and community level.


I started the year reading Maria Ressa’s How to Stand Up to A Dictator: The Fight for Our Future, a book that shows how the creep towards authoritarianism, in the Philippines and around the world, has been aided and abetted by some of our largest tech companies. It was a wake-up call revealing how the foundations of democracy can be destroyed quietly and little by little, by what she calls, “destruction by a thousand cuts”. While she shares her experiences battling the tyrannical former President Duterte in the Philippines, the lessons apply more widely around the globe. Ressa captures with such clarity and conviction our need to engage as citizens and mobilize on the local level.

I am seeing this playbook of “destruction by a thousand cuts” unfold right here in Canada, specifically in Ontario where I’m based. Our conservative provincial government, led by Doug Ford, has been slowly but surely working to dismantle our democratic foundations. Let me count the ways…

  • In response to education workers’ demands for a living wage, Ford’s government passed Bill 28, invoking the notwithstanding clause, which trampled the rights of workers to free and fair collective bargaining. He quickly repealed the bill after sustained public protests.

My partner and I protested at the Ontario Provincial Parliament against Bill 28 and in support of education workers.

His government has also walked back on the promise to protect the Greenbelt – the world's largest greenbelt, which is comprised of 2 million acres of protected land that provide us with fresh air, clean water, and local food and drink. In the midst of the climate crisis, Bill 23 strips the Greenbelt of environmental protections allowing Ford to take 74,000 acres of farmland and natural areas.

  • Known as the “strong mayor” legislation, Ford’s government passed Bill 39, allowing the mayors of Toronto and Ottawa to pass bylaws aligning with provincial priorities without majority support from City Council.

  • Most recently, Ford announced that the government will be directing public money toward private surgery clinics, meaning that a number of publicly-funded procedures will be moved out of public hospitals and into for-profit facilities. This move towards privatization will only worsen the already dire healthcare crisis.

All this in just the last few months!

…but wait – there’s more!

It’s happening on the municipal level too. In just the last month, we’ve seen how Mayor John Tory not only continues to fund the police despite the public’s vociferous calls to defund, but has instead increased their budgets while starving out essential social services. Emergency shelters and warming centres, mental health services, affordable housing options, and community spaces are overlooked as millions of dollars are poured into our community’s surveillance and criminalization.

Slowly but surely, our communities are changing to solely benefit for-profit corporations and problematic institutions. It happens so slowly, so quietly until one day we are just left with a world we no longer recognize, asking ourselves, “how did it all come to this?”

I don’t want it to get to that point. And so my commitment this year (and for the years to come) is to get more involved at the local level. To create change in the proximate environment around me. To take care of the neighbourhood, community, and city in which I live.

Some organizations I am learning from and strive to support over the next year include:

  • Progress Toronto – a not-for-profit organization that advocates and organizes for a more democratic, socially just, and progressive city.

  • Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction – a grassroots initiative that endeavors to reduce the harm and burden that society places on Indigenous people with stigmatized experiences such as substance use, houselessness, incarceration, and most recently, COVID-19 and more.

  • Planned Parenthood Toronto – a community health centre providing trusted and non-judgmental sexual, reproductive, and primary healthcare and programs to youth all across the city. I’ve actually been working with them over the last year as a communications strategist and have learned immensely from their leaders about reproductive justice and investing in our youth at the local level.

  • No Pride in Policing Coalition – an antiracist queer and trans group formed to support Black Lives Matter-Toronto and is focused on defunding and abolishing the police.

  • The 519 – a charity committed to the health, happiness, and full participation of the 2SLGBTQ+ communities.

  • Another Toronto is Possible – a coalition of Toronto-based grassroots organizations including No Pride in Policing, Toronto Indigenous Harm Reduction, Bloordale Community Response, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Toronto, Trans Bisexual Lesbian Gay Asexual at York, Policing-Free Schools, No One Is Illegal Toronto, Doctors for Defunding Police, Jane-Finch Action Against Poverty.

As the community organizer and activist Dave Meslin, writes:

“…the word ‘citizen’, while it automatically entitles us to certain basic rights and privileges, also demands something in exchange. What your city can do for you is important; the flip side, what you can do for your city, is the other half of the deal. It needn’t be as extravagant as building a hospital: you can organize a neighbourhood picnic, fight the demolition of a beautiful building, run for City Council, even just pick up some litter. We can’t wait for the politicians to do these things for us. The way we make our city better is to do it ourselves.”

I don’t know if it’s a function of getting older and simply paying closer attention to the world, or if the pandemic has just put everything in greater focus for me (or honestly, maybe it’s just always been like this)…but the world feels like it’s falling apart faster and in bigger, more catastrophic ways than ever before. From the near-daily climate disasters that are ravaging lives and livelihoods everywhere to the moves toward fascism around the globe. From the racial discrimination and economic disparities that keep widening and deepening to the freakin’ pandemic that has so drastically changed our lives. It all just feels…so bad. So bad that it can often feel crippling.

In the midst of so much doom and gloom, I hold fast to the words of community organizer and activist Mariame Kaba that “hope is a discipline”:

 “It’s less about “how you feel,” and more about the practice of making a decision every day, that you’re still gonna put one foot in front of the other, that you’re still going to get up in the morning. And you’re still going to struggle. It’s work to be hopeful. It’s not like a fuzzy feeling. You have to actually put in energy, time, and you have to be clear-eyed, and you have to hold fast to having a vision. It’s a hard thing to maintain. But it matters to have it, to believe that it’s possible, to change the world.”

Cheers to 2023, my dear friends. May we find the imagination and creativity within us to build a better world.

Pilipino with an Asterisk

Pilipino with an Asterisk

I wrote this piece for my performance at Kultura’s Paniniwala: Acts of Faith at the Art Gallery of Ontario on October 5, 2022. In response to the AGO’s exhibit Faith and Fortune: Art Across the Global Spanish Empire, Kultura invited audiences to witness Paniniwala: Acts of Faith, a transcendent experience of live music, storytelling, and dance that challenges colonial legacies of conquest, domination, and Catholicism through Filipino-Canadian artistic expression.

Rest as Resistance: Disrupting Our Ideas of Productivity in a Hyper-Capitalist World

Rest as Resistance: Disrupting Our Ideas of Productivity in a Hyper-Capitalist World

Since the start of the pandemic, I’ve been sourcing much inspiration from and gratitude for the message of Tricia Hersey, an American poet, performance artist, and activist best known for her work with The Nap Ministry. Advocating for the importance of rest as a racial and social justice issue, Hersey shares such valuable wisdom around the importance of rest, of naps, of daydreaming, of doing absolutely nothing.

For Hersey and for the Nap Ministry, rest is a radical way to disrupt and push back against the oppressive forces of capitalism and white supremacy that tell us we must constantly be working and striving for some standard of excellence impossibly and arbitrarily defined by the powerful few.

Decolonizing Travel and Reframing the Stories We Tell of Our Journeys

Decolonizing Travel and Reframing the Stories We Tell of Our Journeys

As the world begins to open up and more of us consider travel again, I wanted to take a moment here to challenge you to think more critically about your next trip. I want to take a moment to reflect on how a seemingly innocuous and leisurely endeavour is actually so deeply intertwined with global systems of power and oppression.

As my friend, Dr. Anu Taranath writes in her book Beyond Guilt Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World, “Every time I travel, I enter a story of systemic opportunity and adversity that’s been playing out long before me. No matter how justice-minded I might be, my journeys intersect with these historical legacies.”

What’s colonialism got to do with it?

Aside from everything, you mean?

Distancing Myself from Newcomer Filipino Classmates

Distancing Myself from Newcomer Filipino Classmates

When I lived in the Philippines for the first four years of my life, my parents insisted that we speak English at home. They wanted me to learn the lingua franca and knew it would be essential for my success in a globalized and westernized world.

Then when we moved to Canada, my parents insisted that we only speak Tagalog at home. They would refuse to speak to me if I spoke or replied to them in English. My parents were wise and knew that I would easily lose my native tongue in the face of an almost exclusively English-speaking environment.

I grew up in Markham, a suburb just outside of the Greater Toronto Area in Canada that is often hailed as Canada’s most diverse community with visible minorities representing 77.9% of the population. I grew up in a culturally rich community where the “visible minorities” were, in fact, the majority of my daily life.

There was a sizeable population of Filipinos in my high school, many of whom were newcomers to the country. They stuck together and often congregated on a small bridge on the second floor of our high school. And because of that, the bridge was dubbed “The F.O.B. Bridge”, meaning the “Fresh Off the Boat Bridge”.

The students in my high school looked down on those Filipino newcomers, criticizing them for only hanging out with each other and for always speaking Tagalog. “Don’t they know they’re in Canada now?” “How are they going to learn English if they only talk to each other?” I can still hear the murmurs. I can still see the eye rolls.

"Performing" Land Acknowledgments Without the Knowledge or Action

"Performing" Land Acknowledgments Without the Knowledge or Action

Back in the fall of 2017, I was hired to promote and takeover* the Instagram account of Parkbus, a transportation service brand that connects city dwellers to various national or provincial parks encouraging Canadians to spend time in the great outdoors. A friend of mine and I got a complimentary ride to a park of our choice plus a couple of hundred dollars, and in exchange, we would promote Parkbus’ service on our own personal Instagram accounts while also sharing Instagram Stories of our day on Parkbus’ brand account.

As someone who loves to go hiking but lives in downtown Toronto without access to a vehicle (at the time), Parkbus is actually a godsend (and no, they’re not paying me for this endorsement which comes years after that contract, though I’d gladly welcome that!) Parkbus provides accessible rides, connecting those who live in the city to hiking trails, campgrounds, and canoe access points, which are otherwise difficult to get to without a car or through our limited public transportation. And so I was more than happy to engage in this partnership.

When I got to Rattlesnake Park, our park of choice, we began taking photos and videos of our experience. But before sharing anything online, I thought it would be important to start off the Instagram Story with a land acknowledgment. It didn’t feel right to be sharing this experience of the beautiful nature around us without recognizing the history of the land we were on.

To be completely honest, I didn’t know much about Indigenous history in what we now know as Canada at this point in time, but I knew, in a general and vague sense, that we were on colonized land. “Reconciliation” was a concept that was being talked about more and more in my social and professional circles. I had seen maybe one or two land acknowledgments read out loud at events, and I thought that it was a powerful gesture.

All the Times I’ve Been Wrong(ed)

All the Times I’ve Been Wrong(ed)

Over the last decade, I have had the greatest and deepest education of my life. These were not the years I spent learning in Canada’s formal public education system or even my post-secondary academic experience. No, the greatest and deepest education of my life has been self-directed with the guidance of many incredible grassroots educators, activists, and everyday people across different intersections of identity whose lived experiences are not currently acknowledged or deemed “legitimate” or worthy by our existing colonial educational institutions.

The movements of the last decade—Idle No More, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Standing Rock, Occupy Wall Street, Mauna Kea, the Climate Strike, among many, many others — have given me a vocabulary I did not have growing up, that many of us did not have growing up. The #MeToo reckoning and the Black Lives Matter movement, most especially, forced me to reassess so many instances in my life that have always stayed with me for reasons I could not, at the time, understand or vocalize.

These are times that I have been wrong or that I myself have been wronged.

I want to hold space for these precious and painful moments that have been so fundamental in shaping who I am today. I’m starting this publication to look at what I once thought and what I now know and to try to bridge the gap between these two moments in my life. I’m creating this space as a way to move beyond the discomfort of failure in our conversations around social justice and anti-oppression and instead, normalize failure in our discourse. I’m writing these stories as a way to hold tenderness and compassion for an older version of myself who did not know better, but who knows now and is still continuing to learn and unlearn.

Sprinkling Some Holiday Cheer with Radical Care Over Hyper-Consumerism

Sprinkling Some Holiday Cheer with Radical Care Over Hyper-Consumerism

As we wrap up yet another year, I want to offer a little glimmer of inspiration for the future. I want to focus on the possibility – no, the reality! – of a world that focuses on radical care over cheap consumerism. Not just during the holidays, but all year round.

Consider this the “R” of our 3DR approach to equity and anti-oppression: Rebuild!

Untangling Intersectionality: Locating Ourselves in the Spectrum of Power

Untangling Intersectionality: Locating Ourselves in the Spectrum of Power

Earlier this week, I had the honour of delivering my first keynote speech virtually at the Gap Year Association’s annual conference where I focused on this concept of intersectionality.

And I thought, wouldn’t that be a great place to start this brand spankin’ new newsletter? After all, where better to begin than to look at the first D of our 3DR approach? To decolonize and do the internal work of looking inwards into ourselves.

Because ultimately, intersectionality is about ourselves, our identities. It’s fundamentally about all the multiple and complex layers of identities that each and every single one of us holds.

If you already find yourself in progressive social justice circles, you’ll be familiar, if not well-versed, with this framework. But if you’re not, you’re probably hearing the term a lot more frequently these days. Either way, let’s peel back the layers of this complex web!